We Asked William Hurt About His New Show ‘Goliath’ And He Told Us About Kids Living In The Matrix

The new Amazon original drama Goliath marks legendary legal drama titan David E. Kelley‘s return to the small screen. This new venture is an epic legal thriller focused on one monumental case. Billy Bob Thornton plays a brilliant, down-on-his-luck lawyer tasked with investigating what really happened in a horrific boating accident. To win, he has to take down a big corporate law firm headed by William Hurt‘s Donald Cooperman.

Cooperman is an exceptionally sinister force in the series’ first episode. He’s lit in hellish red color and sports a horrific burn scar on the right side of his face. He’s aggressive, intimidating, and he punctuates each scene with clicks from a cricket clicker clacker.

Decider got a chance to speak with William Hurt about the project after a panel at this summer’s TCA press tour. What followed was an unusual conversation about the evolution of human behavior and Hurt’s personal creative process.

DECIDER: Your character is really fascinating to me because, as they talked about it during the [TCA] panel, he does have the trappings of a sinister villain, but knowing you, I know he’s going to have so many more layers to him as well.

WILLIAM HURT: You don’t know me. I don’t write this.

Well, David [E. Kelley], I spoke to him—

There are other layers, yes.

And he was telling me that—

Thank goodness! Thank goodness he said that! Tell David I’m glad he did and tell David I’ll play more of them for him.
Right. Yeah. Well, he was telling me how later on we’ll find out that he’s a much more vulnerable character than he may seem at first glance. Can you speak to that? Is there something to his backstory?

It’s awful tough, this conversation. You and I…you…it would be so much better if we could discuss a piece of work that I’ve been part of that was completed and that you, an audience, who had taken the same risk, had suspended your disbelief, and had seen the whole thing. And then you and I could talk about whether it worked or not, what the intentions were, which were pulled off, what you felt about it, what I felt about it… rather than this endemically limited sense of, I mean, mutual awareness.

I am not disagreeing. I agree with you one hundred percent.

Okay. I agree with me one hundred thousand percent.

I’m just trying to say it’s, uh, the situation. And it should and could be the topic…of dramatic material.

For instance, as an actor, I’m getting old. As an actor, my primary vehicle is my body. And so what I do is I watch people. And I watch the relationship between their body language and all the evolution, all the culture, all the worlds that got them to those gestures.

So, when I’m looking at people — I’m talking to a guy on an airplane — and he’s talking to me about his kids. And he’s saying he’s this and that and a lawyer and blah blah blah… And he’s from India and his wife is from India and they came to this country a long time ago and they’ve had a wonderful life here and they have a few kids here. And when they invite their kids to sit down with them and have a conversation over the coffee table and invite their friends to come along with the kids, they sit across the coffee table with children having conversations like this.

[William Hurt mimes a kid hunched over texting on his phone.]

And then they try to converse with those people. So they have their body language and the kids have their body language on the couch and then all of the sudden, all of the kids will go, “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA,” together. But the people on the other side have no idea what that laugh is about.

Yeah.

But they’re in cyberspace. They’re in the matrix. And the people are still in the nation states. That’s behavior! And it’s massive behavior. My father was born with a kerosene lamp, I was born with the light switch on the wall, you were born with – my children were born with 35,000 bytes per second. Your children are going to be born with terabytes subterraneously installed.

Only —

That changes your physical existence.

Right.

Everything for me is the kind of artist I was born as. My tentacle, my scylla, go out and retrieve that. And I retrieve that in minutiae. I watch that. I watch the way you’re nodding your head now. I watch the way you’re holding your body. I watch your foot. I see all that. That’s my scope. And I’m going, “Okay. What’s your endemic line? What’s your cultural heritage?” First question is “Where are you from?” All that stuff goes into my orientation. So what I’ll do, if I get into the company I want to be in, which is a company of actors playing characters, I will be working with people who will be thinking the same line. And we’ll be making observations for an audience about the massive differences between people that exist now.

You take a look at your generation and your children. The exponentially changing curve of techno, technology and migration and population numbers is changing people so fast physically and the way they behave. The nuances, their physical behavior, is so amazing! Right now, I’m translating between three generations to make this conversation sound like we’re having it now.

Well, I think it’s fascinating. It’s kind of just interesting, though, too, because, well, going back to your character in the show, I think that little tic he has is really fascinating and revealing because when I saw that, I thought —

The backstory for that is his father was dropped in and was a paratrooper behind the lines in World War II. And instead of calling out or whistling to one another — and this is true — at night and drawing fire from snipers that they would communicate by pretending to be crickets.

Gotcha. See, it reminded me of when a child would be playing with a little nuisance toy. You know, when I was a kid, you would make a noise, and it was be delightful to you, but it irks other people. And it sort of shows a lack of empathy, but also it creates this mindset where you’re more interested in your own pleasure than helping everyone else around you get by.

Or you’re annotating other times and different contexts. You’re waiting for them to be intimidated. When it actually means something else.
Yeah, and that’s really interesting that there is a backstory…

Well, there is for me because I have to have one.

Oh, is it in the script?

I don’t think so. And that’s a problem. As an actor, I have to be that participative. In TV, I’m not sure people expect that — even the people who make it, or especially the people who make it. I go that way. I can’t exist without it.
Working with David, I’m assuming that —

I worked with David to the extent that I got words on the page. I’ve only met him three times.

Oh, interesting.

Today’s the third time.

So what drew you to the project? Was it the script? Was it the opportunity?

It was work. The ideas of topics and characters and dimensionalities.

I do have a question about the visual aspect of the character with the burns on the face. I know that David has said that he’s actually based on a real head of a big law firm and you create your own backstory with like the tic—

My backstory is that he got it in Laos. So, there were two illegal incursions during Vietnam. One was into Cambodia and one was into Laos. And he was on a mission that went into Laos and got burned.
When you’re doing research for this character, how deep did you go off the page?

I go as deep as they let me. So what I did is I started the second iteration. The first iteration was thrown out. That was the former version. They gave me the current Cooperman. The previous Cooperman was completely different.

Really? How so?

He didn’t really exist. But they got a lot more focused. Somebody saw something important and then somebody else was allowed to speak and important, good things happened. Which was a shock! I’d never seen so much risked for so much gain.

So then I got the scars and so then I started hammering right away on what I had been hammering for before, but not getting any answers to…which is background. So I don’t act for effect; I act from origins. And then we see what happens.

So I went to Larry Trilling, the sort of core director guy, and I said, “I have a thousand and one questions.” And he said, “Send them to me.” So I wrote them up, pages and pages of them, and he wrote me back pages of answers and I said, “I’m going to use these! My character’s going to come from these answers. This is the life he’s had and that’s what I’m going to play.” He said, “Go ahead.” So I did.

Cool.

It should be cool. If it’s not ratified by the way by the way it’s shown, then it’s a contradiction.

Interview has been condensed and edited. After being asked his about his favorite Shakespeare play, Hurt ended the interview with Philip the Bastard’s “Mad Word” monologue from Shakespeare’s King John, which philosophizes on the concept of commodity.